Baccalaureate Address at Brown University
Delivered by His Highness the Aga Khan

His Highness the Aga Khan, leader of the Ismaili Muslims, delivered the
baccalaureate address to the Class of 1996 at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, May 26, in
the Meeting House of the First Baptist in America, near the Brown
University campus in Providence, R.I.
The text of the Aga Khan's address follows.

President Gregorian
Faculty Members
Post Graduates and
Graduating Students
Ladies and Gentlemen,

President Gregorian, thank you for your very generous words. It is a great
honour for me to be at this Commencement Ceremony as Brown represents much of
what is best in Western liberal education. Let me also congratulate the
graduating students for whom the memory of this day, I am sure, will remain
with them throughout their lives.

One of the things most often said to university students on their graduation
day is that they must now prepare to face the "real world." You should be glad
to hear that I am not going to tell you that, but as someone who has been
living and working in the real world for a very long time, I can tell you this:
the world is now a different place.

It is different from what it was forty years ago, five years ago, different
even from last month's world. It is different because we are witnessing a
massive acceleration in the rate of global change. Today's world is a living
environment in which you will have to adapt much faster than your parents did,
in order to have a positive and constructive impact on the future. Having said
this, the means at your disposal to achieve such an impact have multiplied
exponentially during the last decade. Never before has there been so much
knowledge available about so many different people; never before have we known
more about the physical world in which we live; never before, therefore,
have the
opportunities been greater to make a better life for more people around the
globe.

For the last fifty years, our planet has been frozen by a paralysing
bi-polar political vortex which we call the Cold War. During those years, many
allowed their views to stagnate and harden into notions so dependable that they
became unrevisable dogmas : My capitalism versus your communism, your Eastern
bloc versus our Western bloc, and left versus right. But like the Berlin Wall,
our old bi-polar system was dismantled almost overnight, and with it the black
and white world to which we had grown accustomed. Unfortunately, views and
thought habits, although intangible, are less easily broken than bricks and
politics. Learned human behaviour dies hard.

The world has become a hurtling place in which change occurs constantly, and
in which we need to learn, again, to evolve. Free now from an artificial
tug-o-war in which most were only expected to identify with the rope, we are
facing a world of doubt and questioning, and universal uncertainty, the new
hallmark of our time. Growing from our thawing earth today, is the unsure and
uncomfortable process of discovering and learning about mobility and change. In
all societies, disconcerting but pertinent questions are being asked: Who will
lead in the process of change? What beliefs should guide us? Will they be
scientific statements and data, or philosophical visions? What constraints or
opportunities will shape our future? What are the priorities that we must
address first, and why should they be priorities? That these questions are
answered correctly should be a source of concern to us all. Because if the
responses do not come principally from those of us fortunate enough to have
been educated, fortunate enough to have food and medicine and shelter, who can
make progress in providing these things to the less fortunate, the responses
will come from the contestations of the excluded. In short, the responses
should come from you.

In this new and challenging environment, the people and nations which were
paralysed by someone else's struggle for supremacy are free now to hope.
Despite global acceleration, America still benefits from the intellectual
liberty and hope for the future on which this nation was founded. But these
elements, too easily taken for granted by those who are used to them, are of
primordial concern in many other societies. In Algeria, Bosnia, Rwanda,
Tajikistan, people are fighting and dying because their lives can finally be
changed. Those nations which used to be part of the Third World, have become an
obscure "south" and "east" that, in emerging from obscurity, are increasingly
present. Indeed, the world you are about to enter is a fluid one in which you
will have to be flexible.

President Gregorian tells me that I am the first Muslim ever to give the
Baccalaureate address at a Brown Commencement in the school's illustrious
232-year history. This makes the occasion a very special honour for me. It also
carries the considerable, even intimidating responsibility to speak about the
place of Islam and of Muslims in the world today, about their hopes and
aspirations, and about the challenges that they face. It is also my
responsibility, and indeed a pleasure for me, to speak about what might be
done, and some things that are being done, to respond to these challenges. My
position, since 1957 as Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims bears no political
mandate, it is an independent one from which I can speak to you openly.

Today in the occident, the Muslim world is deeply misunderstood by most. The
West knows little about its diversity, about the religion or the principles
which unite it, about its brilliant past or its recent trajectory through
history. The Muslim world is noted in the West, North America and Europe, more
for the violence of certain minorities than for the peacefulness of its faith
and the vast majority of its people. The words "Muslim" and "Islam" have
themselves come to conjure the image of anger and lawlessness in the collective
consciousness of most western cultures. And the Muslim world has, consequently,
become something that the West may not want to think about, does not
understand, and will associate with only when it is inevitable.

Not only is this image wrong, but there are powerful reasons that we cannot
overlook, for which the West and the Muslim world must seek a better mutual
understanding. The first of those reasons is that with the Eastern bloc
weakened militarily, financially and politically, the Muslim world is one of
only two potential geopolitical forces vis-a-vis the West on the world stage;
the other being the East Asian Tigers. There are large Muslim minorities living
in, and impacting, many European countries. The Muslim world controls most of
the remaining fossil fuel reserves. There is a resurgence of Islam in countries
of strategic importance to the West, such as Turkey. Several Muslim states have
nuclear ambitions. The Gulf war proved that events in the Muslim world do have
a direct impact on global economics and security. The West should ignore
neither the evolution of the Muslim Central Asian Republics nor their interplay
on the future of Russia. Much of sub-Saharan Africa, is Muslim, and none of us
can turn our backs on this continent in need.

The second reason why the Islamic world and the West should seek increased
mutual understanding is that in the wake of the Cold War, it has become obvious
that violence and cruelty of all ilk are a plague gaining ground around the
globe. It can be military, or para-military and brutal, or it can be structural
and inconspicuous, and no less brutal. It ranges from suicide bombings to
ethnic cleansing to the forgetting and abandoning of large segments of society,
even by industrialised nations such as this one.

Against this worrying global background it must be made utterly clear that
in so far as Islam is concerned, this violence is not a function of the faith
itself, as much of the media would have you believe. That is a misperception
which has become rampant, but which should not be endowed with any validity,
nor should it be accepted and given credibility. It is wrong and damaging. The
myth that Islam is responsible for all the wrong doing of certain Muslims may
well stem from the truism that for all Muslims, the concepts of Din and Dunya,
Faith and World, are inextricably linked. More so than in any other
monotheistic religion of the world. The corollary is that in a perfect world,
all political and social action on the part of Muslims would always be pursued
within the ethical framework of the faith. But this is not yet a perfect world.
The West, nonetheless, must no longer confuse the link in Islam, between
spiritual and temporal, with that between state and church.

With the deaths of King Charles the First, and Louis the Sixteenth, Western
culture initiated a process of secularisation which grew into present day
democratic institutions, and lay cultures. Islam, on the other hand never
endorsed any political dogma. So the historical process of secularisation which
occurred in the West, never took place in Muslim societies. What we are
witnessing today, in certain Islamic countries, is exactly the opposite
evolution, the theocratisation of the political process. There is no unanimity
in the Islamic world on the desirability of this trend but it would certainly
be less threatening if the humanistic ethics of the faith were the driving
force behind the processes of change.

The news-capturing power of this trend contributes to the Western tendency
to perceive all Muslims or their societies as a homogeneous mass of people
living in some undefined theocratic space, a single "other" evolving elsewhere.
And yet with a Muslim majority in some 44 countries and nearly a quarter of the
globe's population, it should be evident that our world cannot be made up of
identical people, sharing identical goals, motivations, or interpretations of
the faith. It is a world in itself, vast and varied in its aspirations, and its
concerns.

Is there not something intellectually uncouth about those who choose to
perceive 1 billion people of any faith as a standardised mass?

It is possible that the near-total burden of underdevelopment from which
only a few Muslim countries have yet been able to extricate themselves, unites
us in the eyes of the West and thus sets us apart from it. No world faith,
perhaps, has such a high concentration of people living in poverty and fear,
from disease to political disenchantment, to the defenselessness of national
integrity, from the loss of cultural identity to confusion in the face of the
new forces of pluralism, free market economics and meritocracy. No reasonable
or equitable mind, could question either the logic or the justification for our
fear of occidentalisation, or the loss of our Muslim identity. No one could
question our fear of the disassociation of our belief and practice from our
secular lives, of our difficulties in producing and managing wealth, of our
need to create a system of laws compatible with the ethics of our faith, but no
less compatible with today's world and the needs of tomorrow.

The Muslim World, once a remarkable bastion of scientific and humanist
knowledge, a rich and self-confident cradle of culture and art, has never
forgotten its past. The abyss between this memory and the towering problems
of tomorrow would cause disorientation even to the most secure
societies.

You may ask, and justly so, what has happened to that world, and why has it
reached such an advanced stage of fragility? Many contemporary problems of the
Islamic world are the result of punctual political conflicts, prompted by the
end of colonialism or the Cold War. Are the roots of the conflict in Kashmir
not anchored in the partition of India in 1947? Are not the civil wars in
Afghanistan and Tajikistan due more to the political convulsions of the dying
Cold War than to religious conflict between Muslims themselves? Is the conflict
in Algeria caused by differences in interpretation of the faith among
Algerians, or by an attempt at political change which, put to the test, has
failed? These conflicts are some of the less fortunate legacies of Islamic
states having been used, like others, as pawns or proxies in the Cold War.

Yet many other problems facing the Muslim world now, have existed for
centuries. From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim
civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and
preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and
astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and
knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all
civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be
it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred
year gap in the history of human thought.

It was during the 15th century that Muslim civilisation began a period of
decline, losing ground to European economic, intellectual and cultural
hegemony. Islamic culture began to be marginalised, and worse yet, its horizons
narrowed until it lost its self-respect, and pursued no further the cultural
and intellectual search on which it was embarked. Even as Muslim learning was
studied in the greatest universities in Europe, La Sorbonne, Oxford, Bologna,
it was being forgotten in all Muslim societies from the fourteenth century on.
Little of what was discovered and written by Muslim thinkers during the
classical period is taught in any educational institution, and when it is, due
credit is not given. This gap in global knowledge of the history of thought,
and the faith, of a billion people is illustrated in innumerable ways,
including in such diverse worlds as that of communication and of architecture.
Our cultural absence in the general knowledge of the Western world partially
explains why your media sees Islamic thought as an ideological or political
determinant in predominantly Muslim cultures, and refers to mere individuals
affiliated with terrorist organisations as Muslim first, and only then by their
national origin or ideological or political goals.

This is a considerable problem for the Islamic world in its relations with
the West, particularly because of the impact your public opinion has on the
decisions of your democratic governments. But rather than to dwell upon this
sensitive issue, I would like to illustrate how, in another professional field
- architecture - an analogous breach is being filled through an unprecedented
joint effort by the Islam world and the West.

Since 1957, the Aga Khan Development Network has been involved in building a
large number of schools, hospitals, housing estates and other constructions in
the Muslim world. It became clear that whilst the use of the buildings was
usually adequately defined they had less and less to do with the architectural
traditions of the societies that they were to serve. I found that others too
were facing the same questions. Together, we enlarged our questioning, and it
became starkly apparent that across the whole of the Muslim world, practically
without exception, its great traditions of architecture had disappeared from
its cultural expression. Once the issue had been identified, some of the
greatest architects in the world, from some of the finest schools, and men and
women from all disciplines and all religious backgrounds - Muslim, Jewish,
Christian, Hindu, Buddhist - joined me, creating an Architectural Award and
educational programmes to help address the crisis in our own built environment.
The aim was to widen for people of all backgrounds, the sources of knowledge
and inspiration for the design languages of Islamic societies. After two
decades the best buildings and spaces of the Islamic world, evaluated by
international juries of the highest calibre, are exceptional once again.
Designed and used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, they now address some of
the most intractable problems of our age: urbanisation, management of the built
environment and shelter for the very poor.

This exemplifies the kind of remarkable outcome that educated men and women,
from around the world, can achieve, in as little as twenty years, to begin
reversing the hundreds of years of decay which have eroded our cultural
identity.

Much of the West's knowledge, and intellectual potential, is concentrated in
Universities such as Brown, that have, in recent years, worked their way much
deeper into their wider societies. They have developed global objectives
addressing global issues, thus becoming more accessible as partners in the
development efforts of the Third World.

The Aga Khan University was founded thirteen years ago in Pakistan with
planning assistance from Harvard. It was the first private self-governing
university in that country of 125 million people. Medical Science was the
initial field of engagement. As Pakistan had one of the lowest ratios in the
world of nurses to doctors, and the nursing profession was mired in mediocrity,
social unacceptability and low pay, nursing became our priority. With the
assistance of McMaster University in Ontario, a curriculum was designed and a
School of Nursing launched. In addition to becoming a leading academic
institution, it has transformed the role of women in society by providing them
with new educational and professional opportunities. This solution to some of
Pakistan's most pressing health care problems, which has also enhanced the
social self-worth and professional status of women in the country, may soon be
replicated in other areas. Under the university's international charter, the
nursing school now envisages the creation of an Institute of Advanced Nursing
Studies in East Africa to extend the same professional and societal
opportunities to the women of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and further afield.

First-world knowledge can be introduced and creatively absorbed into
third-world environments to assist in resolving some of its most challenging
development problems. Success will depend, at least partially, on the
adaptability of the knowledge to be shared, and the willingness and receptivity
of the social structures that will be affected. The knowledge exists and its
adaptability is proven, the material resources can be found, but the social and
cultural empathy which prepare any successful long-term process of human change
from one society to another, are still deeply lacking.

The same consideration also applies to ideas. Concepts such as meritocracy,
free-world economics, or multi-party democracy, honed and tested in the West
may generally have proven their worth. But valid though they may be,
responsible leadership in the Islamic world must ask if they can be adapted to
their cultures which may not have the traditions or infra-structure to
assimilate them: There is a real risk that political pluralism could harden
latent ethnic or religious divisions into existing or new political structures.
There is a real risk that marketplace economics could lead to ruthless
competition, and increased concentration of wealth, further marginalising the
existing poor. There is a real risk that meritocracy could exacerbate, for
example, the existing problem of equitable access to quality education and
sophisticated health care. Although the modern page of human history was
written in the West, you should not expect or desire for that page to be
photocopied by the Muslim world.

You, the graduates, are entering your own society at a time when it is
questioning many of its own determinants, and seeking stability, direction and
inspiration from its own ethical and cultural roots. In the Muslim world we are
doing the same.

No doubt you are seeking to prepare yourselves, as well as you can, for the
risks and opportunities of the suddenly globalised environment in which you
will live and work. In the Muslim world we arc doing the same.

As globalisation unfolds, the Islamic world will be there in myriad ways.
Multitudinous encounters are inevitable.

It is time for all of us to ask: how can we ensure that these innumerable
contacts will result in a more peaceful world, and a better life?

We should be seeking out and welcoming these encounters, and not fearing
them. We should be energising them with knowledge, wisdom and shared hope.

But this will be enormously difficult to achieve until the civilisations and
faith of the Islamic world are part of the mainstream of world culture and
knowledge, and fully understood by its dominant force which is yours in the
West.

In this exhilarating new world of unprecedented knowledge, freedom to use it
outside worn out dogmas, and immediate global communication, it should be a
matter of serious concern to the West and the Islamic world, that such a deep
gulf of misinformation and misunderstanding subsists. That gulf conditions the
way we perceive each other. Its omnipresence damages our capacity to build a
better world for ourselves. And it has no basis in logic. The great Muslim
philosopher al-Kindi wrote eleven hundred years ago, "No one is diminished by
the truth, rather does the truth ennoble all." That is no less true today.

It is only here in the West that governments, intelligentsia, media,
entrepreneurs are all -- in some way -- linked to your universities. They
impact,
or actually create, much of our world's general and specialised knowledge. They
challenge what may be wrong and validate what is correct. They research what
they do not know. Is it not time for you to use these tools to build a bridge
across the gulf of knowledge which separates the Islamic world from the West?
Do you question that we will be by your side? No, if I can judge from my own
experience.

We have much to build with. A common Abrahamic monotheistic tradition.
Common ethical principles, founded on shared human values. Common problems of
yesterday, resolved together. Common challenges of tomorrow, that we can best
face together. These, and all that much more that I cannot enumerate, but are
fact, are the materials with which to build a bridge. Enlightened by sound
intellect, I see its structure strongly built from the realities of our world.
But any structure requires bonding, and of all the bonds that can link
societies, America epitomises the strongest. It is called hope. The right to
hope is the most powerful human motivation I know. Its importance has been
paramount in the history of this nation. It is a reasonable expectation that
the next generation will be better equipped to address the challenges of life
than the present one. How beautiful that bridge of hope would be between the
West and the Islamic world.